Talk:Southern Victory
This needs a lot more line editing than a spelling correction to get it up to snuff, and even then it's content poor. Maybe we should just make it a redirect to Timeline-191, which could use a lot of substantive editing itself. Turtle Fan 14:23, September 22, 2009 (UTC) If only... Oh, I wish HT would revisit this timeline... he stopped it just as my favorite OTL era was beginning (the post-WWII era)... why, Turtledove, why? Mellophonius 00:34, September 30, 2009 (UTC) :Because the story's over. The story was about a divided North America. Now North America is united. From this point forward it could only be told as a tale of internal conflicts, or else as one of intercontinental conflicts. Neither has anything to do with the story's setting. Anything he wants to play with within either of those themes, he can do more directly in other AHs, with the conflicts set closer to the timelines' PODs. He admitted in writing that ideas about a postwar insurgency of the sort certain Rebels wanted (though both surviving nonblack Rebel POVs nipped those in the bud when the chances presented themselves) would really just be ideas about a postwar resistance in fallen Germany, so he wrote The Man With the Iron Heart instead of TL-191 12.0. Turtle Fan 01:44, September 30, 2009 (UTC) :This might interest you, Mellophonius. MojSvetJeVidiek (talk) 22:05, January 20, 2013 (UTC) : Confederate Army Barrels I remember reading somewhere that the Confederate Army Barrel Mk III was for all intents and purposes the Soviet T-34, or at least that's the tank it most closely resembled from OTL. I've been searching high and low for where I read that but I've been coming up empty handed. Any ideas? 18:43, April 19, 2010 (UTC) :I have no idea, I'm afraid. TR 18:44, April 19, 2010 (UTC) Timelines I really don't know where to begin, but having this article written as a timeline rubs me the wrong way. This should be an article written from a real-world perspective, talking about the series as just that, a series of books, which is what the comparable pages of other series do. And the timeline sections just don't fit our formatting, either. Their perspective feels half real world, half in-universe. :I think that while our policy of writing articles about people, places and events as though the author lived in that timeline makes sense, this wiki is in OTL. We do have articles on the books of Turtledove plus his influences and co-authors. It seems to me to be overly twee to re-write articles such as this one, which is about a series of OTL AH stories as though they were histories or perhaps historical novels from the ATL. This article seems to fit a straight description of events from OTL perspective much the same way the articles for the individual books are done. :I just skimmed through the article so I'm not sure of what you mean by a mix of styles. It seems to be simple summary of events in the books (both on and off stage). ML4E 22:58, March 11, 2011 (UTC) ::I don't want the article written as though it were an in-universe description of a series of novels of straight historical fiction, if that's what you mean. I think that this is not a place for such detailed summaries, however. Maybe the articles on each novel are, but not here, which is about a broad overview of the series. I like the idea of having summaries on pages dealing with publications and would even submit that we should rewrite articles on shorts and novels that don't include such things now. But on a series page, especially an eleven-installment series page, the summaries will either be superficially short or will easily get out of hand--maybe even both. :::Ah, I see, sorry I misunderstood you. However, I believe a series summary with a time-line would be as useful as one for each individual book. Definitely less detail than in book summaries and with references to each book at the end of the appropriate time period rather than references to each of the sub-series as it is now. However, summarizing all major events from the loss of the special orders to the end of the series and especially inter-book periods is useful because it puts all this information in one place for easy access. ML4E 20:17, March 12, 2011 (UTC) ::::Farther down we were saying master timelines might be good ideas for the long series. It shouldn't be on the series page, though. Turtle Fan 22:29, March 12, 2011 (UTC) :::So you do. However, I don't see an advantage in having a timeline in a separate article rather than as a sub-section(s) in the series article. ML4E 20:03, March 15, 2011 (UTC) ::As for mixed styles, these summaries are written in a predominantly in-universe style, with cumbersome references to comparable OTL events plopped down here and there, often parenthetically. This paragraph is a good example: :::::::"Thanks to a rare flash of insight by aging General George Custer, the US Army finally learns to deploy barrels en-masse. US forces under Custer finally smash through Confederate lines in Tennessee, seizing Nashville. In Canada, Winnipeg and Quebec City fall, and a puppet Quebec government declares independence from Canada. Soon the Confederacy's ally, France, is forced to capitulate to the Germans (in OTL, American soldiers reinforce the French by this time). Using Custer's barrel tactics, a breakthrough is achieved in Maryland, and Washington, DC, is retaken by US forces. Despite a last-minute use of Negro soldiers by the CSA, the war is lost by late 1917." ::Incidentally, it also goes in for a bit of editorializing: "a rare flash of insight," "a puppet Quebec government." :::I don't find it written in a in-universe style but a fairly straightforward description of events while admittedly using in-series terms such as "barrels". I do agree on the editorializing though. ML4E 20:17, March 12, 2011 (UTC) ::The summary's style should be all-in universe or all-OTL. The side-by-side comparisons of events belong in Literary Notes on the pages dealing with them. I also seem to recall that we started doing Parallelism pages a year or so ago for compiling master lists of such things in one convenient place; I suggest we resume that. ::Ah yes, here we go: Parallelism in Southern Victory. Turtle Fan 23:22, March 11, 2011 (UTC) Still, a lot of work went into these descriptions, stuff that would be worth salvaging and which I would hate to see deleted altogether. Maybe we could work it into an in-universe set of publication information, as a kind of summary: "The American Empire Trilogy (B&I, CCH, and VO) tells the tale of the rise of the Freedom Party, led by Jake Featherston, and of the Confederates' clandestine rearming of their military. It also explores internal economic and social strife in the USA as the Socialist Party is able to take advantage of the end of the Remembrance Era to reshape the electoral map. The US also finds itself drawn into a number of foreign policy problems elsewhere, including the Pacific War, the Mexican Civil War, efforts of Quebec to establish its place in the world and in relation to the US, simmering resistance in occupied Canada, the inability to intervene in the Armenian Genocide, and a marked cooling of its alliance with Germany, with whom it actually fights a proxy war in South America. Meanwhile, the status of black people in the CSA grows ever more precarious, as Featherston takes advantage of lingering resentment over the predominantly black uprisings of 1915 to revitalize and expand Confederate racism, pushing it toward its most terrifying logical extreme." At the same time, some of the best-written sections could maybe used to augment the articles on the events they describe. And now that I think of it, we've got three series whose in-universe chronologies span a long, long time: This one, Worldwar, and Videssos. All three have God knows how many of major and minor events in their canon, and long periods of time that lapse between installments, in which things happen which are not covered in the books but still play an important role on series canon. So we might want to make actual Timeline articles, putting everything in one place. Thoughts? Turtle Fan 02:49, March 10, 2011 (UTC) Add Atlantis to the above: That's 450 years' worth of story. Though there's not all that much of significance that happens in the gap periods between books. Pirates move into Avalon; William Radcliff gets murdered by Ethel; Victor's children die in infancy; Nicholas Radcliff dies of tetanus; USA fights a war against the British; Haiti analog fights a revolution; Spanish Atlantis gets acquired by USA; honkers go extinct. Am I missing anything? And, of course, we have no dates for any of those. We have no dates for things that happen onstage, either, except for the first meeting of Radcliffe and Kersauzon, Old Man Radcliffe's death, and Audobon's discovery of what were probably the last honkers. Would make doing a chronology a bit of a challenge. Turtle Fan 02:56, March 10, 2011 (UTC) :I admit, I've been unhappy with how this article looks for a while now. The problem is, everytime I review and think "We should fix this", I am immediately struck by the realization that "Fixing this will take a lot of work." :Obviously, many of the problems you've alluded to stem from those early days before our cadre became the custodians of this place, and various ideas were being tried. :Anywho, enough wool-gathering. Your proposals: I do like the idea of timelines for the various series, and I do think we need to give a fuller accounting of what each novel, sub-series, etc is about. It's just finding the motivation. TR 17:34, March 10, 2011 (UTC) ::Indeed it is. Maybe the trick will be to wait till some even more onerous task looms, and use this as an excuse to put it off. Turtle Fan 21:51, March 10, 2011 (UTC) Turtledove's influences "A possible influence, in a negative way, is Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" - a seminal work in the sub-genre of Civil War alternative history. In Ward Moore's scenario, the rump US is totally broken and demoralized by its defeat - becoming a backward, second-rate country, living in the shadow of the victorious Confederacy, a major world power. Turtledove - who has edited a reprint of Moore's work - presents a polar opposite: far from broken, the US, even having lost its southern portion, remains a major military and economic power, able (and on occasion, eager) to engage in repeated bouts of fighting." I'm a little down on this paragraph. I'm pretty certain HT has said he's read BtJ, but I don't think he's ever acknowledged it having a role in his writing of 191. Since the paragraph begins with BtJ being a "possible influence", I'm not inclined to keep it. If we can get an acknowledgement that HT was indeed influenced by BtJ, then it's a keeper. TR (talk) 04:57, November 18, 2017 (UTC) :HT edited the short form of of BtJ for The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century and wrote a thumbnail critique accompanying it, but has never specifically said it influenced either GotS or 191. The added paragraph is too vague and speculative, and probably should be axed. HT has specifically named Kantor's ItSHWtCW as an influence on 191, but has made no similar statement about any other prior AH works that I can think of. There is only thing that might be specifically Mooreian in HT's CSA-wins works: namely, in both BtJ and GotS, Lincoln is succeeded as POTUS by Seymour, rather than McClellan who would be the intuitive choice, but even that's a bit of a stretch.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 05:06, November 18, 2017 (UTC) :This can definitely go. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:48, November 20, 2017 (UTC) :Agreed. ML4E (talk) 23:31, November 20, 2017 (UTC)